


One Evening on the District 12 Train

by M_A_Salter



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Casual Sex, F/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26590708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_A_Salter/pseuds/M_A_Salter
Summary: Effie and Haymitch come to separate realizations in the wake of the Quarter Quell announcement.
Relationships: Haymitch Abernathy/Effie Trinket
Comments: 1
Kudos: 30





	One Evening on the District 12 Train

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something. My first post, so please don't be shy about commenting. My ideas about these two are so generally unsettled, I welcome all your thoughts.

Effie Trinket was feeling relaxed. The train had left District 12 a few hours ago, after a fairly successful photo shoot of Katniss and her bridal trousseau. They had transmitted the photos immediately, and the plan was to broadcast the segment tonight. She, Cinna and the rest of the team had had a nice dinner, and she had retired to her cabin to write-up her notes of the event and watch that evening’s Quarter Quell announcement.

Most people who followed the games closely were no doubt excited to hear what this year’s “twist” would be. But as Effie sat there, sipping champagne, making her notes about methods of getting Katniss to cooperate, and thinking intermittently about the upcoming games, she realized that her excitement was mere habit, if it was present at all. Her excitement to see the final, fully-produced version of Katniss’s photo segment was real, but the thought of the Quarter Quell gave her a queasy feeling that was more in the neighborhood of dread than excitement.

Her younger self would not have predicted this. Her younger self would have been beside herself with delight to think that she would be working as a tribute escort for the Third Quarter Quell. When she was still in school, years before she had taken this job, she’d written a paper on the history of the Quarter Quells. She had spent time in the Capitol Archives, reading the papers and correspondence of the original committee that invented the Hunger Games. When she had started working with the District 12 tributes—ten years ago now—she was _an enthusiast_. For the games, for the Capitol, and above all for the vision of Panem that the Capitol represented. But in those last ten years she had gotten to know twenty tributes, and had watched eighteen of them die.

In the early years she had convinced herself that the horror she felt was her own sacrifice for the good of the nation. She thought that it needed to be a little horrible to do its work in the hearts of the people, and that it needed to do that work to keep everyone safe from another war. Gradually, the weight of her grief over these children accumulated. The experience of over and over again imagining them living the glorious life of victors, and then watching them be stabbed, drowned, burnt, poisoned— _murdered_ —ground away at her rationalizations. Her growing disillusionment didn’t shake her deep belief that she needed to put on a brave face for the tributes—to present _to them_ an untarnished image of the games as both necessary and winnable—because without hope they would have no chance. But by the time of Katniss and Peeta’s Reaping, it was a facade. The face she showed in public and to tributes was all that was left of her belief in the games. And added to this general sense of the meaningless of it all, last year had convinced her that the games were not only horrible in themselves, but arbitrary and capricious: less the heritage of the nation and more the political tool of a particular administration.

A decade ago, when she had first started, Effie had been completely perplexed by Haymitch’s bitterness. He had been equally appalled by Effie’s seeming belief in the party line. But as she started to change her mind about the games, the two of them also began to change their minds about each other. Effie began to understand what the experience of surviving the games could do to a person, and how twenty years of watching them would only exacerbate that pain. And Haymitch could see how hard Effie took the loss of their tributes every year, and he was there to be a sounding board when she first began to question her long-held beliefs.

One year, a few years in, they had a particularly young and weak tribute, whom Effie had grown very attached to. The girl was brutally beaten to death by a Career on the second evening of the games. The night it happened Effie asked Haymitch not to leave her alone, and she had cried herself to sleep in his arms.

The next year, a particularly promising tribute made it all the way to the final three. There was a harrowing encounter between him and the eventual winner, and the tribute from 12 narrowly escaped. In that moment of exuberance and hope, as they and the stylists celebrated his escape, Effie kissed Haymitch, and in the awkwardness that followed, they both realized it was something the other had thought about before. The next night, when the tribute was finally killed, Effie found Haymitch in his room, and demanded more than a shoulder to cry on.

The year after that they didn’t wait for their tributes to die, but took solace in each other’s beds whenever Haymitch was in the Capitol or Effie was in District 12. It was just sex, just physical comfort in a world that afforded little psychological comfort. It wasn’t a relationship, just…an arrangement. They both agreed that they wanted it that way.

All these thoughts were tumbling around in her mind when the “mandatory viewing” message appeared on the little TV in her cabin. After some small talk from Caesar, Katniss’s segment began. Effie was relieved to see that while (of course) Katniss looked wonderful in all her gowns, she also had a believable smile on her face for most of the photos. In all the darkness of Effie’s loss of faith in the games, Katniss and Peeta were a bright spot. Even though she no longer believed in “the life of a victor” as she once did, they were safe, and she looked forward to working with them in years to come. She knew that Katniss was still mostly pretending to love Peeta, but she also knew enough of human nature—and of those two kids—to know that it was only a matter of time. In the long-term, Katniss could not fail to recognize Peeta’s worth, and would grow to love him accordingly.

Effie’s glow of pride over the success of Katniss’s segment carried her through the first moments of Snow’s talking about the Quarter Quell. She was jolted back to attention when he mentioned the 50th Games: Haymitch’s games. She felt a pang for him. He had never told her much about his experience of it, but of course she watched it on TV like everyone else, and getting to know him as she had in theseyears, she could see how it haunted him, how any relief in his victory has been spoiled by his continued involvement, and how his nightmares have lead him to drink. A single tear escaped her eye, which she dabbed with her handkerchief just as Snow opened the envelope.

“On the seventy-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot oversome the power of the Capitol, the male and female tributes will be reaped from each district’s existing pool of victors.”

Effie felt adrenaline flood her system. Her heart raced and she could taste bitterness in the back of her throat. A split second later this overwhelming fear reached her consciousness, in the form of the sudden image of Haymitch’s face, and she let out a tiny, desperate sob. Unbidden, her mind began to spin through a hundred half-formed thoughts of how he might be saved. One of them kept recurring: Peeta. And once she was able to hold this thought in her mind for more than a second, she began to cry in earnest, for she knew that Haymitch would do everything in his power to save that boy, she knew with perfect certainty that he would volunteer to take Peeta’s place if given the chance, and she knew with equal certainty, in the same moment, that she loved Haymitch desperately. She had been fooling herself all these years, thinking they were only friends and colleagues.

It took a few minutes for her sobs to subside. She took a hitching breath and slid off the settee and onto the floor of the cabin, reaching for her handkerchief to wipe the slurry of tears and snot and make-up that was dripping from her chin and down the front of her dress.

She held the handkerchief to her face with both hands and tried to control her breathing. With her eyes shut tight, images of Haymitch filled her mind, and she felt a sickening mixture of affection and foolishness. How could she have lied to herself so effectively for so long? How could she have not understood that she loved him? She loved his quiet strength through all these years of horror. She loved the softness, the kindness of his beautiful grey eyes, even when the rest of his face was scowling. She loved how he obviously and rather ineptly cleaned his house before her every visit to 12. She loved that he would drag his broken soul out of despair long enough, every year, to do what little he could to protect the tributes from the ghastliness of the games.

When they’d first started sleeping together, Effie still had a real life in the capitol. She had friends and boyfriends and the hope of a future there. Without fully realizing it, she had let all of that slowly slip away. Her world had narrowed to the little world she and Haymitch shared. When she wasn’t in the Training Center, or in District 12, or on the train between them, she was just going through the motions of her old life. She had understood Haymitch to be a dalliance that bore no relationship to her real life. But it turned out that life hadn’t been real, it had been propaganda, like the games themselves.

____

Meanwhile, in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy was getting drunk. Peeta had just been in his dining room, wanting to come up with plans for how they could best protect Katniss in the Quarter Quell. Haymitch had every intention of protecting Katniss to the best of his ability for the rest of his life, but he didn’t really want to talk about it now. He had reassured Peeta in fervent terms, in order to get him to leave.

He had other plans to make. And if the Quarter Quell announcement hadn’t brought it home to him, Peeta’s pleas would have: he too had someone he owed everything to, someone he had to protect at all costs, and it was high time he told her. He knew Effie was happy with the no-strings-attached nature of their arrangement, and until tonight he had been content to keep his love for her a secret. But there was a good chance he would be murdered in that arena, and the time had come to confess.


End file.
